Buying and selling securities and other investments typically requires constant attention to prices, news information, and recommendations of large securities firms and investment advisory services. News of changes in recommendations issued by large institutions tend to affect prices within several days of the announcement. Private investors typically have contacted their securities firm or their stock broker for price, news, and recommendations. This method, while satisfactory, was time consuming and sometimes difficult, since stockbrokers typically have many clients to serve, and spend a large portion of their day selling securities rather than brokering information.
Individually, private investors have access to personal quotation devices such as the Marketline terminal, U.S. Pat. No. 3,716,835, (Weinberg et al, 1973). The Marketline system consists of a central processor facility which collects securities information from the exchanges and interfaces this information to a number of terminals via standard telephone lines. The terminals have a cradle for a telephone handset, and a means for coupling data from the handset to display and from the terminal keyboard to the central processor. The subscriber to this system dials a private telephone number and enters, via the keyboard, a password to obtain securities information.
Another patent, U.S. Pat. No. 3,976,840, (Cleveland et al, 1976) describes a similar terminal identified as a portable securities selector system. This terminal provides not only for securities information to be elicited but also for transactions to be automatically executed by an investor from a conventional telephone. Once again, the investor dials a private telephone number and enters via a keyboard, a password to obtain securities information.
Both of these systems suffer from the drawback that the subscriber must be near a telephone. Moreover, in order for the phone not to be busy when a subscriber requests information or wishes to execute transactions, the system must use a large number of telephone lines at its central processing facility. This increases the expense of the service to the subscriber. In addition, the subscriber cannot maintain connection to the service since this will tie-up phone lines and the processor, and be quite expensive to the subscriber.
A number of patents have attempted to solve the problem of telephone connection to the central processor. U.S. Pat. No. 3,387,268, (Epstein, 1968) discloses a "quotation monitoring unit", in which continuously updated stock trading transaction information is transmitted over a communications channel from a central location, so that a plurality of portable radio receivers referred to as "tapewatcher apparatus" respond to transmitted data regarding a "predetermined number of subscriber selected stocks" to display the relevant stock market information. This system suffers from the disadvantage that the system sends "multiplicities of essentially chronologically arranged stock trading transactions" to the owner of the terminal. In this case, the owner would have to continuously monitor the communications channel in order to obtain proper quotations of a security. Moreover, if a security did not trade early in the day, an owner could conceivably be without the information for the better part of the day. In addition, the quotation mointoring unit had no provisions for security, therefore it was difficult to provide subscription services.
An alternative form of the above is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,611,294, (O'Neill, 1971). This patent discloses a somewhat similar concept, which specifically refers to continuous transmission or broadcasting of stock market information in encoded form, to be received by a plurality of broadcast receivers, each of which is provided with a "decoding attachment", or a completely self-contained receiver-decoder which transfers subsequently received information to a suitable readout display upon receipt of a predetermined identity message. In this system, each receiver is coded by identification coad wheels to establish an identity coad for a particular stock, and when information is received by AM, FM or PM transmission regarding that stock, a shift register identifies the coad for the particular stock and provides an output pulse producing the display of the message regarding the stock price, etc. However, this system suffers from a number of disadvantages. Due to the design of the decode wheels/decoder attachment, a particular securities price is present at the output (display) only when the decoder wheels are set to that security. Subscribers to this service must wait for the transmission of information on the security of interest before it is displayed. They must wait for a correlation between the identity code for a particular security and the receipt of a predetermined identity message. This wait may be several minutes if a large number of securities are transmitted and private investors are apt to be impatient.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,112,369, (1978) represents a later version of a radio broadcasting system for transmitting, on FM, continuously updated stock data regarding securities and commodities. The "portable receiver terminal" includes a tuned FM receiver and a keyboard for entering a password to identify a particular subscriber. A "keyboard" is generated to decode the received data regarding particular stocks to store the date for future use or to be displayed. The keyword is generated using an identification number stored in the terminal. When a subscriber desires to display broadcast information regarding current stock market prices, etc., or selected stocks, he enters a "unique password" in his keyboard which is combined with the identification number to generate a "keyword" which decodes the received binary data and produces an output display of the stock market data. This system is advantageous in that the identification number stores in the device must be combined with the password entered on the keyboard in order to form the keyword; passwords cannot be shared among subscribers. However, it suffers from the disadvantage that each receiver terminal must have a unique identification number stored in it. These terminals do not lend themselves to mass production and are therefore more expensive to produce than terminals not prewired with such numbers. Moreover, passwords and terminals are uniquely connected adding additional complications to inventory control, terminal distribution, and subscription accounting of the service. The subscriber has the added inconvenience of entering his password on the keyboard whenever he turns on the unit to request information.